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Real data and test data – both are needed
One of the great things about both QlikView (QV) and Qlik Sense is their integrations with other systems. Given the native connectivity to any ODBC source, web pages in general, Salesforce, REST APIs, BigQuery etc – combined with the dozens of connectors provided by tools like QVSource – I have yet to find a single system or data source we could not pull data from.
The great thing about this is that it makes it easy to quickly get some real data and then start building your application.
That said, sometimes you need a limited data set to start with, or just some conceptual data to try out an idea on. Enter online test data generators, which can be used to generate test data for
These tools and services come in many different flavours, in this post I will merely list a few that I have found useful. There are probably many more great tools out there – feel free to add them in the comments.
httpbin
This is not as much a test data generator as a service that comes in handy when you develop connectivity to different kinds of services and APIs.
Let’s say you need to read XML data from some source system. You probably then want to start out by testing your first lines of code on some simple XML data, rather than throwing a large, complex XML structure on the code right away.
Simple – in your QV or Sense load script, just load data from https://httpbin.org/xml and you will get an XML response back. In addition to XML data, there are lots of other different kinds of http related data that can be requested from the service.
Mockaroo
Nice, no-nonsense service that lets you create test data sets with up to 1000 lines of data for free. If you need largest test data sets this is available at a cost. Mockaroo can create data sets containing vastly different kinds of data – anything from (fake) credit card numbers, to addresses, shirt sizes, bitcoin addresses and much more.
Generatedata.com
Nice, open source service that you can either use from the author’s website, or download from GitHub and run from your local computer. Not quite as many options when it comes to data types as Mockaroo, but given its zero cost it is still a nice tool. As always though – if you use an open source tool regularly – please consider donating to the author, if she/he has a way of doing that.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia provides a nice overview page about the generation of test data at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_data_generation.